1. Introduction

On the first day of December 1904, the last day of a carefully planned urban utopia brought together people from many different places and backgrounds to experience the world’s fair for the last time.1 At least two-hundred-thousand people gathered on the grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition sharing mixed feelings of sadness, wonder, and nostalgia. Some visitors traveled a couple blocks to see the fair and its president David R. Francis for the last time. Others would soon be leaving the United States after seven months of transiting between cultural universes by walking. It was the so-called Francis Day: the grand spectacle of colors, shapes, tastes, and sounds was about to vanish from the city as if it never happened.

For the last time, fair officials marched from the administration entrance through Skinker Road. After stopping at the Administration building, Francis and other commissioners continued the march towards the Louisiana Monument at the core of the fairgrounds. Behind the monument, separated by the Great Basin, two of the main exhibit buildings, surrounded by thoughtfully designed water ways, contributed to a generalized sense of order.2 Francis, Governor Dockery, and other members of the local political elite stood in front of the north side of the monument and addressed the crowd with their closing speeches. Governor Dockery said that the fair’s lesson was made evident to every visiting foreigner: that the United States was “the greatest nation in all the world.” He also made sure to address the foreign commissioners gathered around the monument to warn them about an ongoing “war of peaceful conquest.” That war, he argued, would prove to every nation in the world the United States’ economic and commercial supremacy.3

Figure 1: Area-focused map of the St Louis World’s Fair grounds. On Francis Day, fair officials entered through Skinker Road (bottom right) and followed through the outskirts of the Pike to reach the Louisiana Monument by the Great Basin. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/99466762/
Figure 1: Area-focused map of the St Louis World’s Fair grounds. On Francis Day, fair officials entered through Skinker Road (bottom right) and followed through the outskirts of the Pike to reach the Louisiana Monument by the Great Basin. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/99466762/

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, world’s fairs became the stages of planned urban utopia in which geopolitical and cultural groups negotiated their economic power, symbolic prestige, and modern collective identities.4 It is unlikely that the crowd heard what governor Dockery said in a world where microphones and amplifiers did not exist.5 If fair goers did not hear it, however, the physical arrangement of the event and its symbolism echoed the governor’s words, and Francis and other American commissioners listened proudly while foreign elite representatives applauded. The fair in St Louis offered a particular spatial narrative of modernity–that is, a discursive representation of modern collective identities based on notions of progress and civilization. Because the “exception” can only exist in a universe of comparable elements, said narrative was strongly dependent on the participation of particular geopolitical and cultural entities deemed as “uncivilized,” in particular, of Native American and Native Philippine groups. This article investigates how local newspapers, as a particular kind of audience to the fair, perceived and reproduced such narrative while imagining a specific geography of modernity and the American colonial empire at the turn of the century.

Historians have often discussed how exclusionary principles of modernity, civilization, and progress underpinned the arrangement of world’s fairs. Robert Rydell’s work was pioneer in offering a social and cultural perspective on world’s fairs as symbolic universes that not only legitimized the hosting country’s political and scientific authority in the race for modernity, but also provided “a meaning for social experience, placing ‘all collective events in a cohesive unit that includes past, present, and future. (…)’”6 Those principles enabled fair visitors to experience a digestible version of the modernizing world of the turn of the century, one that necessarily required the objectification and visual separation of cultures in space. But the extent to which audiences received the message is yet to be addressed. As one particular kind of audience, cultural commentators like newspapers and magazines responded both to the fair message and to visitors’ spatial experiences of the fairgrounds. In St Louis, during the months of the fair, local newspapers generated discursive representations of the participant geopolitical entand cultural ities that reinforced an “imagined geography” of modernity centered around the United States as an emerging colonial power.7

More recent scholarship on the fairs has pushed for a closer attention to how visitors and broader audiences experienced the fair and its ideological message. In 2009, historian James Gilbert wrote about the memory and experience of the fair in St Louis and suggested that scholars of world’s fairs have often described them from the perspective of the organizers and failed to consider common people’s experiences. Gilbert argued that fairgoers did not necessarily look at the fairs as symbolic universes of political and cultural legitimation and affirmation of national values.8 To understand the extent to which particular social groups successfully perceived underpinning narratives of modernity and otherness proved to be a complicated research task that is yet to be fully addressed. In response to dialectical interactions between discursive communities who negotiated their modern identities at the fair–-in this case, fair makers, geopolitical entities, and visitors–-, cultural commentators’ particular positionality enabled them not only as receptors of the fair message but, more importantly, as producers of their own representations of the world and said communities.

Even though the analysis of those cultural representations in the newspapers cannot account for the visitors’ perception of the ideological message on the fairgrounds, their “take” on the collective modern identities is a valuable step towards a more complex history of world’s fairs. Many of the newspaper articles examined for this project incorporated, relied on, and described the spatial experiences of visitors on the grounds for the stories they told. Aware of newspapers as interest-driven parties with their own motifs, historians have largely avoided them as sources for factual precision and historical accuracy. Still, historians of culture have long proved the value in assessing the representations and worldviews in newspapers that resulted from discursive negotiation between multiple social actors. During world’s fairs, newspapers not only advertised them as profitable events with attractive storytelling features, but they also incorporated fair goers’ discourses and worldviews in writing stories of the fairs. As events that fostered sociability, movement through space, and economic relations, world’s fairs enabled fair goers to generate their own rhetorical repertoire about the world and its people displayed at the fair. Even though this article cannot account for the visitors’ perception and imagined geography, it looks at newspapers as another kind of audience that attended to both visitors’ and fair makers’ rhetoric of modernity to produce and promote their own.

Some scholars have emphasized that the fairs were meant to win the hearts and minds “as well as the disciplining and training of bodies.”9 For sociologist Tonny Bennett, the “exhibitionary complex” turned the problem of creating and maintaining a particular social order into a problem of culture. As part of said complex, world’s fairs made visible to the masses the dynamics of power, discipline, and state surveillance. By arranging, regulating, and displaying bodies, they enabled visitors to understand the role of “subjects” and “objects” in the constitution of a new, voluntarily self-regulating citizenry.10 Anthropologist Burton Benedict, in turn, focused on the rather ritualistic dimension of the fairs, emphasizing the competition (rather than top-bottom imposition) between participating nations and intellectual elites during the events.11 As organized spaces of cultural encounters and power relations, the expositions incentivized negotiation in the narrative dimension over each participant group’s view and experience of modernity. In a similar direction, historian Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo’s examination of the Mexican representation in the material dimension throughout varied fairs suggested that geopolitical entities, in particular colonized nations, invested in fair exhibits to push for their own interpretation of their modern collective identities. By focusing on how local newspapers received and reinterpreted the ideological message of the St Louis fair in 1904, this article understands the Louisiana Purchase Exposition as a complex microcosmos of modernity embedded with ritualistic competition, contradictions, and tense power relations.

In fact, those power relations were often less visible than scholars have suggested. Governor Dockery was wrong about the peaceful aspect of the war of conquest he mentioned. The same evening of Dockery’s closing speech, three dead Igorrote bodies were shipped back from Missouri to the Philippines. The Igorrotes, an ethnic group native of the Cordillera Mountain Range in the northern Philippines, had been objectified and exposed at the fair as examples of uncivilized culture and died of pneumonia shortly after they arrived in St Louis in the spring. Their bodies were kept on the fairgrounds for months before fair officials cared to arrange their shipment back home, which finally happened on the last day of the fair. Along with those dead bodies, other sixty-nine alive Igorrotes headed back to their homeland the evening of Francis Day.12 The Igorrote’s tragic example encapsulates how the message embedded on the fairgrounds depended on the otherization of different ethnic groups and geopolitical entities to emphasize the exceptional modern identity of the United States.

The fair ideological message, its perception by cultural commentators, and the cultural representations they generated about it are equally relevant to the understanding of the dynamics of power at play (and on display) at the fair. Even though historians have accessed and examined personal letters, diaries, and other sources that shed light on how visitors experienced the exhibits, close reading of those documents often proved insufficient to assess how audiences reflected upon and discursively represented the language of empire and colonialism embedded on the fairgrounds.13 Hence the importance of paying attention to the role of newspapers as a particular kind of audience: by attending to the cultural commentary about the Louisiana Purchase Exposition through the use of “distant reading” methodologies, this article unearths how newspapers represented the geopolitical and cultural identities involved with power dynamics at the fair. It also explores how, from said representations, newspapers contributed to an imagined geography of modernity centered around the American colonialism and exceptional modern identity.

This article uses digital methodologies to contribute to scholarship on world’s fairs as symbolic universes in two ways: first, it demonstrates how methodologies of digital humanities like distant reading, word vector analysis, and named entity recognition can help historians assess how the fairs enabled particular cultural and discursive representations of the the hosting country and the world. Second, it pushes for a closer attention to the role of newspapers as one kind of audience to the fair’s ideological message: one that attends not only to the message, but to dialectical interactions and discursive negotiations between groups on the grounds. Newspapers further relied on the ways in which other audiences perceived and engaged with the language of empire and American colonialism at the fair in order to write their stories and produce complex discursive representations of participating cultures and the modernizing world.

2. The rhetorical construction of the American Empire

In the morning of the last day of April 1904, immediately before David Francis made official the opening of the world’s fair, William Howard Taft, representing President Roosevelt, was trusted with the responsibility to give one final address to the thousands of people attending the ceremony. Taft said that the fair was “the union of nations in a progress toward higher material and spiritual existence.” But more than that, his speech emphasized that “the government of the Philippine Islands has felt justified in expending a very large sum of money to make the people who come here to commemorate the vindication of one great effort of American enterprise and expansion understand the conditions which surround the beginning of another.” During the McKinley administration, between July 1901 and December 1903, Taft had served as the Governor-General of the Philippines, the first civilian governor after a period of American military control over the islands. Serving as the Secretary of War by 1904, he contended that the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase marked “the beginning of the great Philippine problem.”14

After Taft’s speech, Francis sent the signal to the White House that would let Theodore Roosevelt know it was time to press the golden telegraph key and provide electrical power to the entire exposition. “Open, ye gates, spring wide ye portals,” said Francis, while urging visitors to “behold the achievements of your race: learn the lesson here tonight and gather from it inspiration to still greater achievements.”15 The lesson to be learned within the gates was not only about the achievements of a modernizing world, but even more so about what made America so exceptional in face of other modern nations at the turn of the century. As historian Paul A. Kramer has demonstrated, to make sense of the “great Philippine problem,” U.S. officials and state-builders like Francis and Taft relied on the principle of national exceptionalism.16 They believed and defended that the United States was indeed not an empire like those of European powers. Rather, the justifying principle for the emergence of the United States as a colonial power was the belief that the American expansive republicanism and “benevolent assimilation” abroad were much different from everything else.

As early as the 1890s, American historian Frederick Jackson Turner suggested that any explanation of American history had to come to terms with the notion of the frontier and its implications. “The frontier,” he contended, “is the outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilization.”17 Despite Turner’s importance for Western Historians that followed and the field of U.S. History in general, his conceptualization of the American national identity as naturally exceptional has been long rejected in twentieth-century historiography. However, as historian Thomas Bender has more recently argued, throughout most of the nineteenth century, the American perspective on the Pacific and East Asia had much to do with the American expansionist ambitions towards the west.18 When Turner contended that the continental frontier was closed in 1893, American politicians had already been concerned about the next chapter of the history of American proud republican expansion.19 The rhetoric of empire and U.S. national exceptionalism that grounded the American acquisition and dominance of the Philippines by the turn of the century are key to the understanding of the world’s fair in 1904 as a site of struggle and negotiation between geopolitical entities and their own views of modernity, civilization, and American colonialism.

If the early European rhetoric of empire and land appropriation was largely based on religious justification, by the late nineteenth century, the United States gradually sought legitimization for its imperial actions less on terms of American Christianity and more on economic development and notions of racial hierarchy. The Manifest Destiny, in Bender’s words, had become “as much a racial concept as a political one, about the rights (and responsibilities, too, it was believed) of ‘civilized’ nations to rule lesser, uncivilized peoples.”20 By the 1890s, and based on the racial and political premise of American superiority, the McKinley Administration used the unstable political circumstances in Cuba to get involved in the war against Spain and justify the annexation of Hawaii.21 Further, defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War in the name of “freedom” and Cuban independence resulted in the United States acquiring sovereignty over the Philippines as well as the territories of Guam and Porto Rico.22

During the occupation of Manila by U.S. Troops, local compromises between American diplomats and Filipino insurgents on the ground caused tensions and diverged from what the U.S. State Department had envisioned for American sovereignty over the islands.23 A competition of state-building strategies between Filipino officials and U.S. commanders followed the Spanish defeat. To add to the complexity of the power dynamics at play, Filipino leaders often recurred to the language of “civilization” in seeking international recognition of the Revolution and Emilio Aguinaldo’s self-sufficient government.24 If Aguinaldo and his diplomatic representatives could convince the United States of the civilized character of the insurgent Filipino government, they thought, the American troops had no reason to stay in control of Manila. But the American lingering presence in the Philippines, in particular, did not come without controversy and domestic opposition.

The American perspective on the Filipinos and their capacity to learn self-government was far from homogeneous, and the “post-war” society blurred the lines of race and civilization in the islands. Anti-imperialist Americans often looked at racial hierarchy to argue against incorporation of allegedly inferior people since it could undermine the meanings of American citizenship.25 Further, as Kramer has demonstrated, this racial anti-imperialism was heavily informed by the domestic experience of the “Negro problem” and the fear of further “racial corruption” of the United States as a result of the incorporation of more colonial subjects.26 Public opinion at home was greatly informed by the anti-imperialist ideology and the fear that incorporating territories could undermine the power of white American citizens. As a result of the American military’s reporting on their war experience, it was also common in the public discourse to represent Filipino people and their “barbarous fighting” as savages, non-Christians, and racially inferior.

Those who did not oppose the American occupation of the islands saw it as a benevolent guidance of a non-civilized people towards self-governance. The civilian regime that followed the military dominance sought to distinguish itself from the U.S. army, its war-like practices and treatment of natives. Taft himself made that distinction clear in 1901 during a speech to the Senate by saying that the military regime had found and dealt with “the natives who are in an actual state of war” while the civilian regime had met “the natives who are interested in civil government.”27 After the six-year-long Philippine-American War, the political configuration and racial narrative employed during the civilian regime was meant, in Kramer’s words, to “persuade its Filipino participants that they were ‘brothers’, not ‘serfs’ [of Americans]. It was also meant to justify the necessity of American tutelage for even the Filipino elites were not ready for the rigors and responsibilities of self-government.”28

In the years prior to the world’s fair, the colonial relationship between Americans and Filipinos was characterized by efforts to bridge the civilization gap between both people in midst of an ongoing state of war. For that enterprise, American teachers were sent to the Islands and understood to be their own kind of missionary army. They carried the “white man’s burden” on their shoulders as they took it upon themselves the task of instructing “a people who neither know nor understand the underlying principles of our civilization.”29 The rhetoric of a “postwar” society based on the notions of “regeneration” and “revitalization” proved to be a challenge for the civilian government in a war-like environment. In fact, as Kramer has argued, the formal declaration of an end to the Philippine-American War did not mean an actual end to war-like circumstances on the islands. Rather, a victorious end to the war was an American narrative strategy that meant, on the one hand, to calm anti-imperialist protest in the metropole. On the other hand, the narrative of a complete war sought to convince the Filipino elites that the insistent American control over the islands was not against their political interests of self-governance and self-determination.30

From the politics of Filipino-American collaboration emerged a decentralized colonial state. Politically, the civilian government had to find ways to mitigate the power of local Filipino elites by limiting their areas of influence to newly established provinces subordinate to the central government. Racially, the rhetorical division of the Filipino population between a Hispanicized elite and the so-called “non-Christian” tribes contributed to the American strategy of civilizing-missionary state building in the islands. Although religion was a more prominent concept under the Spanish rule, race had already been intrinsic to the rhetoric of empire and the socio-cultural stratification of the Filipino population. By the turn of the century, however, as Donna J. Amoroso has demonstrated, the American colonial rule relied on more secular and pseudo-scientific categories of race to survey, represent, and control the Filipino population.31 If the civilization rhetoric was a crucial strategy for American dominance over Manila, it also became a crucial component in Filipino self-determination and pro-self-governance discourse.

Pragmatically, the use of the rhetoric of civilization and racial superiority manifested in the Philippine Census. Initiated in 1903 and published in 1904, the Census of the Philippines Islands served, as historian Vincent L. Rafael has argued, as “an apparatus for producing a colonial order coextensive with the representation of its subjects.”32 In the context of a colonial state that needed to assert its legitimacy both to its colonial subjects and to the international community, the Census not only reinforced the narrative that the war was formally over, but it also served to reinforce the importance of collaboration between the American civilian government and the Filipino elites in the efforts to build a new “imagined community,” to use Benedict Anderson’s framework. With the census and other state bureaucratic tools, such community would be grounded on principles of participatory democracy and, even more so, it would represent and reinforce the racial configuration that separated “wildness and civility”, Hispanicized elites from savage tribes.33 Filipino elites insisted in a cultural and racial difference between themselves and non-Christian Filipinos. Those tribes like the Moros and the Igorotes were considered to be in their own, long path to civilization while Catholic Filipinos saw themselves as racially superior and capable of self-governance. Leveraging on the political and racial beliefs of the local elites, the American civilian government incorporated their worldview in the new racial and political configuration of the colonial state. “Inclusionary racial formation,” in Kramer’s words, was the only way to achieve successful collaboration with local Filipino leaders, and ensure the advance of American “benevolence and tutelage.”34

But the success of this newly imagined community and the invented Filipino-American colonial state depended not only on the political collaboration with Hispanicized elites, but it also relied heavily on the production of cultural and discursive representations that could legitimize the state in face of anti-imperialist groups in the metropole. Socially and culturally divided by the racial formation of the colonial state, the Filipino population struggled to assertively represent their own modern identity to the international community. By 1903, the problem of cultural representation was such a central matter for the Filipino-American civilian government that the planning of the St. Louis World’s Fair divided opinions. They had to decide whether to include Igorrotes, Moros, and other native groups in the exhibit, and if their presence on the fairgrounds could mislead Americans and the broader international community to think of the Filipino people as less civilized. For American elites and fair makers in particular, the question behind this decision was whether emphasizing the cultural differentiation between Hispanicized Filipino elites and non-Christian tribes favored the rhetoric of empire and American exceptionalism to be embedded in the physical layout of the fair.

3. The U.S. and the Philippines in an “imagined geography” of modernity

The undeniably massive presence of the Philippines as a geopolitical entity at the world’s fair in 1904 found repercussion in local newspapers. Between the first and the last day of the fair, The St Louis Republic, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch were three of the most important local newspapers reporting about and from the world’s fair. These newspapers were representative of a class of cultural commentators that established narrative hegemony about the fair and other matters in the city of St Louis throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1945, journalist Charles G. Ross, who had been associated with the Post-Dispatch for most of his professional life, wrote an entire book on the history of the newspaper. By the turn of the century, he argued, the Post-Dispatch had become a “thoroughly national newspaper” with broad interests in issues of national scale.35 Although overstated in Ross’ biased account, the newspaper’s engagement with national matters was reflected on the thorough report on the world’s fair planning and its political dilemmas, having printed the equivalent of 988 pages about it between June 1901, when the organization of the exposition started, to December 1904, when it closed. Still, The Republic went even further and published the equivalent of 1,012 pages during the same period, while the Globe-Democrat printed an average of five and one-half columns daily about the fair.36 When writing commentary about the dynamics of the fair, the exhibits, and the fair goers engagement with them, those three newspapers mentioned the Philippines almost just as much as they mentioned the United States.

Figure 2: Most mentioned place-names in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, The St Louis Republic, and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat during the months of the world’s fair.
Figure 2: Most mentioned place-names in the St Louis Post-Dispatch, The St Louis Republic, and the St. Louis Globe-Democrat during the months of the world’s fair.

The map above shows how often each place-name emerged in a data sample of 275 articles of the three St. Louis newspapers randomly collected from a digital database.37 The articles were stored across 461 JPG files that were then OCR’ed using the R package tesseract and processed as plain text data in RStudio. With a raw count of 196,336 words, the analysis is significant as a sample of potentially broader patterns to be encountered in future work. As Cameron Blevins has argued, newspapers were among the cheapest and most available sources of geographical information by the turn of the century.38 They contributed to the production and shaping of space in the imaginary of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Americans by printing particular locations more often than others. During the seven months in which the world’s fair was open to the public in St. Louis, those prominent local newspapers engaged, if unintentionally, in determining one imagined geography of modernity. Here, the emphasis on one is important for it reinforces that the cultural and discursive representation of modernity found in St. Louis newspapers was only one possible representation in the midst of many others. The analysis of how those three newspapers produced a cultural representation of the world in response to the rhetoric of American empire on the fairgrounds suggests that the arrangement of the fair and its embedded ideological message reflected much larger issues of the time. It echoed complex decisions in American foreign policy and issues of colonialism and imperialism towards the Philippines.

Because of the nature of the world’s fair as a microcosmic metaphor of modernity, searching for the names of populated places in the newspapers is insufficient to replicate the geography of modernity that resulted from the cultural commentary about the fair. On the fairgrounds, the material culture in display served as metaphors for the represented geopolitical entities, and every mention of nationality, culture, or ethnicity is intrinsically associated with a geographical place in the globe. For this reason, the varied ways in which cultural commentators reflected on and talked about the fair generated discursive representations of the participating geopolitical entities. Said representations are reflected not simply in the place-names printed on the pages, but also in every mention of national and cultural identities and material culture on the grounds that ultimately referred, as a metaphor in itself, to the geopolitical entity represented on the grounds.39

Of course, this approach comes with complications. Taking into account every mention of nationality and its variations in the corpus required a lot of close reading parallel to the distant reading methodologies.40 However, interventions to the data and the algorithmic process are a crucial component to humanistic inquiry that uses computational tools. In the words of Shanon Leon, when it comes to humanistic inquiry, most data sets cannot “stand on their own without clear and thorough documentation that accounts for the many decision points along the way.”41 Further, Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell have argued in favor of the interpretive responsibility of humanists and historians engaging with text analysis and quantitative methodologies. They remind us that computational tools do not produce meaning they are rather meant to “facilitate the augmented hermeneutic cycle,”42 and in this sense, the automated process of extracting named entities would have been useless without human intervention based on thorough knowledge of the input data and its historical context.

After many interventions and data cleaning, the final data set of place-names contained 106 unique observations, each presenting one place name extracted from the corpus, the count, and its geographical scale (city, state, country, or region). As seen in Figure 2, the two most frequent place names were United States and Philippines, with 287 and 194 occurrences respectively. This result in itself significantly reinforces the core argument of this project: that the narrative of modernity embedded on the grounds of the fair in St Louis was greatly dependent on the otherization of the East. It was indeed a comparative view of the world, like it was the case during any other world’s fair: in order to showcase and praise the progress of the civilized West, it had to show its counterpoint.

The significance in this case, however, lies on the political and cultural context in which the St. Louis World’s Fair took place. By the 1890s, with the settlement of the Pacific coast, Turner had recognized that the American “energies of expansion” were to be directed overseas. In fact, he observed “the demands for a vigorous foreign policy, […] and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries” as symptoms of a continuity between the settlement of the West and a larger imperialistic movement abroad.43 The American colonial endeavors in the Philippines by the end of the century were the most ubiquitous evidence to the historical continuity that Turner observed. As Bender has pointed out, much similarly to the process of removal of the Native American people or the occupation and acquisition of Mexican territory throughout the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, the global extension of American culture was part of a much larger American imperial praxis justified by a common “message of uplift and modernization.”44 The fair in St. Louis was not the first time that a Philippine exhibit was part of an American fair. But in St. Louis, said message of “modernization”, based on very specific notions of race, empire, and civilization, was not only part of the mentality of American fair makers and elite members like Francis and Taft; it was rather the fundamental principle that made possible the conceptualization and construction of an over-sized Philippine exhibit in the St. Louis 1904 World’s Fair.

As discussed before, the problem of cultural representation was a central matter for the Filipino-American elites in islands. In 1903, still serving as the Civil Governor of the Philippines, William Taft traveled to St. Louis to meet with David Francis and the Fair executive board for the first time. The purpose of the visit was simple: to make the case for a strong, imposing, unprecedented Philippine exhibit at the 1904 world’s fair. “[…] If we have your [the board’s] help,” Taft said, “we hope to make the Philippine exhibit the great feature of this exposition.”45 By the end of Taft’s plea, Francis said that “The people of the United States felt that it was their duty to look after the nine or ten millions of people in the Philippines, and guard their interests, give them education and advance them to civilization.”46 Taft’s conceptualization of the exhibit found reasoning in two main purposes: First, he was rather interested in proving to the American society that the work he had been doing in the islands was indeed providing fruitful results. The importance of having a model of a Philippine school on the fairgrounds, in this sense, and of bringing back some missionary American teachers and their Filipino students could not be overstated in Taft’s case. Second, Taft hoped to use the fair’s cooperation as an opportunity to convince the Filipino elites that Americans were allies in “completing pacification and in bringing Filipinos to improve their condition.”47

Although Paul A. Kramer has argued that the exposition planners’ dedication in including and centering the Philippine exhibit in the fair was not “about the U.S. national exceptionalism but its opposite”, this project suggests that, on the contrary, because of how crucial the narrative of benevolent assimilation and guidance towards self-governance and civilization, the fair message did, in fact, rely on principles of American exceptionalism in face of increasing European imperialism. Further, the conditions upon which the American interest in the Pacific increased were specific to the political and cultural circumstances within the United States by the late nineteenth century. Those circumstances did not make the United States empire exceptional; it did, however, make its rhetorical foundation on “uplift and modernization” unprecedented. The resulting cultural representation on the fairgrounds reflected the complex, heterogeneous perspective of American officials towards Filipinos. On the one hand, some American officials insisted that the exhibit should consist of representatives of the Hispanicized elites with whom the American state had the experience of collaborating and negotiating power dynamics with. Others, in turn, believed that the presence of Filipino elites could cause complications: Again, because of the symbolic nature of the world’s fair, their mere presence on the fairgrounds meant international recognition of the Philippines as a legitimate, independent state.48

Similarly, the presence of Native tribes from the islands, some believed, could harm the image of the Filipinos as too far from the civilizing progress. Whatever the decision should be, the Philippine exhibit ought to exist under a careful rhetorical balance between progress and wildness, modernity and otherization, future and past of the human race. As a microcosmos of early-twentieth-century modernity, the St. Louis World’s Fair was a catalyst for new cultural representations of the United States and the world. In the local newspapers, those representations reflected the characterization of the United States and the modernizing world, sometimes, in seemingly binary yet complex notions of empire, race, and civilization.

4. Between Wildness and Civilization

In order to assess how cultural commentators characterized the geopolitical entities that were part of the geography of modernity they helped imagining, this project relies on another methodology of the digital humanities: word embedding models. According to historian Ben Schmidt, word embedding models are useful to explore relationship between words through spatial analysis while allowing “a much richer exploration of the vocabularies or discursive spaces implied by massive collections of texts […].”49 Although not extensively accurate nor ideal for relatively small corpora, the word vector analysis has proved significant for this project as it reinforced how local newspapers relied on particular notions of empire, race, and civilization – even if unintentionally – to produce discursive representations of the geopolitical entities and their modern collective identities. For instance, observe the preliminary list of words that have a significant score of similarity to the words “savage” and “progress” below: 

model %>% closest_to("savage", 30)
##           word similarity to "savage"
## 1       savage              1.0000000
## 2       tribes              0.7682139
## 3         guns              0.6806628
## 4       island              0.6479932
## 5     carnival              0.6197844
## 6      cocopas              0.5889805
## 7       taught              0.5860853
## 8    primitive              0.5709723
## 9        coast              0.5599243
## 10    champion              0.5575465
## 11    feathers              0.5533017
## 12     shelter              0.5512407
## 13     peoples              0.5410098
## 14       ainus              0.5314459
## 15       moros              0.5309560
## 16       dance              0.5291390
## 17  possession              0.5243268
## 18     african              0.5240147
## 19    barbaric              0.5204271
## 20        tiny              0.5124199
## 21       drill              0.5115900
## 22     natives              0.5104708
## 23      drills              0.4988404
## 24      dances              0.4976498
## 25  patagonian              0.4969251
## 26     strange              0.4908066
## 27         ark              0.4870668
## 28 performance              0.4840119
## 29       broad              0.4761955
## 30        moro              0.4757591
model %>% closest_to("progress", 20)
##             word similarity to "progress"
## 1       progress                1.0000000
## 2          great                0.6629980
## 3          world                0.6249069
## 4       greatest                0.5995019
## 5     exhibition                0.5925618
## 6        variety                0.5892081
## 7      universal                0.5833198
## 8        nations                0.5757261
## 9   civilization                0.5668228
## 10    individual                0.5613827
## 11      interest                0.5606060
## 12 international                0.5492352
## 13       century                0.5489799
## 14          most                0.5462242
## 15       science                0.5437637
## 16     conceived                0.5429951
## 17     primitive                0.5412609
## 18      products                0.5410288
## 19        nature                0.5359212
## 20        nation                0.5262326

The similarity score indicates how closely associated a set of terms are within the semantic dimension of a corpus. In the preliminary assessment above, a few things can be noted about the “savage” list. First, the word “tribes” is, semantically, the closest word to “savage” in the corpus, and two words that are related to performance show up associated with “savage”: “dance” and “carnival”. Second, a few specific Native groups show up like the Cocopas from North America, the Ainus from Asia, and the Moros from the Philippine Islands. Third, other terms that denote a similar characterization of these groups relevantly show up: “barbaric” and “primitive”. When it comes to the “progress” list, similar trends call the reader’s attention. Most of the the list is composed of fairly broad ideas like “civilization”, “nature”, “science”, “universal”, and “individual”. No specific mentions of particular entities or groups seems as relevant as broader, intangible principles.

Even more interestingly, one term shows up in both lists: “primitive”. As discussed before, the rhetoric of empire and American exceptionalism at the fair was highly dependent on processes of otherization of non-Western cultures. The appearance of the term “primitive” in both lists is an expected link, a signal from the algorithm that, even though those two universes are allegedly separated, they overlap in complex ways in the ways local newspapers commented about the fair and the geopolitical entities that negotiated their modern collective identities on the grounds. Following the hint, the graphs bellow sought to visualize both sets of terms separately for a closer examination of the vectorized relationships between words. 

#visualize semantic similarity of "savage" and "progress" based on the previous lists
modernity = closest_to(model,model[[c("progress", "civilization", "science")]], 60)
vectors_modernity = model[[modernity$word,average=F]]
plot(vectors_modernity,method="pca")

otherness = closest_to(model,model[[c("savage", "primitive", "barbaric")]], 60)
vectors_otherness = model[[otherness$word,average=F]]
plot(vectors_otherness,method="pca")

It is important to note that, like Schmidt has warned us, word embedding transformations are not sufficiently suitable to represent multidimensional relationships – which, for clear reasons, are always preferable when trying to replicate real-world relations.50 Since vector models represented in often two dimensions (x and y), many expected similarities (like, “dance” and “dances”) do not show up close to each other. When this happens, it only means that the algorithm found a particular dimensionality of the relationship between both terms that is not so evident for us. Further, because of the barrier of OCR errors at the current stage of this project, some tokens that show up in the graph are rather irrelevant and empty of meaning. Still, many of the relationships that are plotted are worth noting and exploring for they shed light on how local newspapers thought of, wrote about, and represented the rhetoric of modernity and American empire at the fair.

The first graph plots the 60 words with higher similarity coefficient towards the terms “progress”, “civilization”, and “science” while the second plots the 60 words with higher similarity coefficient towards the terms “savage”, “barbaric”, and “primitive” – all part of the original similarity list for “progress” and “savage”. In the first graph, fairly centered in the main cluster of words is the word “american”, surrounded by terms like “remarkable”, “example”, interest”, “progress”, “civilization”, and maybe most notably, “war”. To the left of the main cluster, more spread out words, including “science”, “interested”, “human”, “attractive”, “finds”, and “novel” bring back to the notion of spectacle and modernity propaganda that is intrinsic to the world’s fair. To the right of the main cluster, a smaller grouping emerges around the words “universal”, “achievements”, “nations”, and “peace”. The central positionality of the words “war” and “peace” in separate but related clusters in the first graph suggests that progress and civilization, semantically, are somehow associated with war and peace – interestingly, remounting to Governor Dockery’s speech on the closing ceremonies of the fair about the American “war of peaceful conquest” abroad. Finally, the most peripheral level of the graph brings together “views”, primitive”, “barbaric”, “races”, “benefit”, and “international”, besides the rather isolated mentions of “twentieth” and “journalists”. Again, the spatial narrative of “barbaric” groups positioned at the periphery of the modern American empire explains the shape of the visualization.

The second graph follows a similar trend in organizing the discourses about the fair through the center-periphery model. This time, however, the Moros from the Philippines are central in the main cluster, surrounded by “barbaric”, “carnival”, “dances”, “wear”, “savage”, “capable”, “guns”, and “head_hunters”. Other native groups are then placed on the far right, as if their characterization proves less significant to the rhetoric of empire in display at the fair than the characterization of Moros. The Sioux and Cocopas, from North America, the Pygmies from Africa, and the Ainus from Asia show up in this peripheral group. But more importantly, it is worth nothing that every side of the visualization contains at least one term related to performance and spectacle. “dancers”, “performance”, “spectators”, “war_dance”, and “dance”, quite literally, surround the entire graph from the most peripheral level, indicating that words like “savage”, “primitive”, and “barbaric” are always associated with cultural performativity. 

#plot semantic similarity of "savage" and "progress" together
otherness_modernity = closest_to(model, model[[c("savage", "primitive", "barbaric", "progress", "civilization", "science")]],100)
vectors_otherness_modernity = model[[otherness_modernity$word,average=F]]
plot(vectors_otherness_modernity,method="pca")

With this in mind, the third graph above plots both conceptual universes together. Interestingly enough, the left side, where the words “savage”, “barbaric”, and “primitive” show up centralized, contains spread-out performance terminology as the first notable peripheral level surrounding them. Further, the vector representation seems to be increasingly compressed from left to right, as if it follows an organizational pattern towards the right side of the graph – where “civilization” populates the center. In this third graph, the visual separation between native groups and the civilizing “funnel” that seems to be leading “savage” groups towards “remarkable” “progress” serves, rather unintentionally, as a metaphor of the fairgrounds and its rhetoric of empire and modernity. Through cultural performativity, native groups played the part in the discursive construction of modernity, in which the United States emerges as the example of progress and remarkable achievements – as per the first graph.

5. Conclusion

Instead of a black-and-white kind of display in which the United States showed as synonym of progress and civilization while the Philippines existed as its antagonistic pole, the narrative embedded in the physical layout of the fair was much more complex, nuanced, and controversial. Fair makers had to find the precise balance between, on the one hand, otherization of the Filipinos as barbaric, non-Christians, and representatives of a conquered past through modernization, and on the other hand, the assimilation of Filipinos as a people with potential for self-governance, with enough similarities to the American ways that could justify its incorporation. To add on the complexity of representation and discourse, cultural commentators did not simply replicate the fair makers’ narrative of modernity centered around the United States as an emerging colonial empire. Rather, they reflected on the modern collective identities on display and in constant negotiation on the grounds and, informed by their own interests and worldviews, engaged in a complicated process of imagining modernity in space. In the process, as the previous session has demonstrated, local newspapers still characterized participating geopolitical entities according to the physical separation of culture that organized the fairgrounds, where conceptualizations of what is savage, barbaric, and primitive were necessarily peripheral to the notions of (benevolent) progress and civilization that underpinned the modern identity of the United States as a colonial state. But being peripheral, however, does not mean that those concepts were less important components to the broader rhetorical structure of empire in display. 

#Cluster Dendrogram of "savage" and "progress"
topics = c("savage", "primitive", "progress", "civilization")
term_set = lapply(topics, 
                  function(topic) {
                    nearest_words = model %>% closest_to(model[[topic]],15)
                    nearest_words$word
                  }) %>% unlist

subset = model[[term_set,average=F]]

subset %>%
  cosineDist(subset) %>% 
  as.dist %>%
  hclust %>%
  plot

  1. “Francis Honored Guest of World on Last Day of Exposition,” The St. Louis Republic, December 02, 1904.↩︎

  2. In his account of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, historian James Gilbert argued that the event reflected utopian ideals of the city. Although not always successful, fair organizers tried to present a controlled urban environment and impose a specific social and cultural order to the audiences. James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 15.↩︎

  3. “Francis Honored Guest of World on Last Day of Exposition,” The St Louis Republic, December 02, 1904.↩︎

  4. In 1977, John Allwood wrote a comprehensive history of the World’s Fairs: John Allwood, The Great Exhibitions (London: Studio Vista, 1977). Other important scholarly references include Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vitas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); and John Findling, Kimberly Pelle, Historical Dictionary of World’s Fairs and Expositions, 1851-1988 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1990).↩︎

  5. James Gilbert, Whose Fair: Experience, Memory and the History of the Great St. Louis Exposition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8.↩︎

  6. Despite Allwood’s earlier contribution to the field, Robert Rydell’s cultural analysis and approach to the fairs has had a deeper impact in argument-driven interpretations of the fairs. In conversation with sociologists like Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Rydell argued that the fairs were more than entertainment events and held deeper ideological meanings. Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2.↩︎

  7. This project relies on Cameron Blevins’ terminology and framework to understand how newspapers “print, and thereby privilege, certain places over others.” Blevins relied on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of space as a social construct and Edward Said’s idea of imaginative geographies.” He also took into consideration Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities. See: Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region: A View of the World from Houston,” Journal of American History (June 2014): 122-147.↩︎

  8. James Gilbert, Whose Fair, 5.↩︎

  9. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Abington: Routledge, 1995), 62.↩︎

  10. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum , 63.↩︎

  11. Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World’s Fairs: San Francisco’s Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915 (Berkley: Scholar Press, 1983), 7.↩︎

  12. “Igorrotes on Way to Island Home,” The St. Louis Republic, December 02, 1904.↩︎

  13. Martha Clevenger edited an important account on the St Louis World’s Fair of 1904 and relied on visitors’ experiences as early as 1996. This interpretation was part of a broader historiographical shift in the last decades of the twentieth century towards individuals, groups, and classes that had been left out of mainstream historical narratives. Martha Clevenger, Indescribably Grand: Diaries and Letters from the 1904 World’s Fair (St Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1996).↩︎

  14. “Secretary of War Lauds President’s Policy in Philippines,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 30, 1904.↩︎

  15. “Brilliant Opening of World’s Fair,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 30, 1904.↩︎

  16. Paul A. Kramer, “Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons” in Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 75.↩︎

  17. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History. Originally published in 1920. Introduction by Andrew S. Trees (The Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading, 2009), 2.↩︎

  18. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 220.↩︎

  19. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 220-222.↩︎

  20. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 209.↩︎

  21. Office of The Historian, “The Spanish-American War, 1898”. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1866-1898/spanish-american-war.↩︎

  22. Office of The Historian, “The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902”. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1899-1913/war.↩︎

  23. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 96-97.↩︎

  24. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 100-101.↩︎

  25. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 222.↩︎

  26. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 117.↩︎

  27. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 194.↩︎

  28. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 161.↩︎

  29. Adeline Knapp, “A Notable Educational Experiment,” in Gleason, Log of the Thomas,” Apud Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 169.↩︎

  30. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of The Government, 171. As Julian Go contended in his Introduction to the book The American Colonial State in the Philippines, historians must come to terms with the distinct aspect of the United States imperialism in the Philippines. The acquisition of the islands and political dominance over its people by the United States was not simply a manifestation of American imperialism, but rather of colonialism. In Go’s words, colonialism was “a distinct form of imperialism that involves the explicit and often legally codified establishment of direct political domination over a foreign territory and peoples.” By now taking part in the colonial rule of territory overseas, American officials had to create a new state apparatus – both practical and symbolic – with a certain political and racial configuration that somehow incorporated local elites without undermining the power of the central government. Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 5.↩︎

  31. Donna J. Amoroso, “Inheriting the”Moro Problem”: Muslim Authority and Colonial Rule in British Malaya and the Philippines” In Julian Go and Anne L. Foster, eds., The American Colonial State in the Philippines: Global Perspectives, 125.↩︎

  32. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love And Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 24.↩︎

  33. Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, 35; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. First published in 1983 (New York: Verso Books, 1991).↩︎

  34. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government, 226.↩︎

  35. Charles G. Ross, The story of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis: Post-Dispatch?, 1949), 7.↩︎

  36. Jim Allee Hart, A history of the St Louis Globe-Democrat (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1961), 184-185.↩︎

  37. The articles were collected as JPG files from Newspapers.com. Even though Chronicling America is the standard open-source, digital database of historical American newspapers, the search engine provided in Newspapers.com made this project feasible in a timely manner. Further, unlike Chronicling America, Newspapers.com included digitized pages from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, a newspaper that historians of the St. Louis World’s Fair have constantly relied on as primary source. The collection was done through both random and proportional sampling, which means that the textual data is proportionally distributed across the three newspapers and the seven months of the fair using a fix interval, yet the articles chosen to populate each date were randomly picked from the “word’s fair” term query results.↩︎

  38. Cameron Blevins, “Space, Nation, and the Triumph of Region,” 128.↩︎

  39. So, for example, for the named entity extraction in this project, occurrences of “Brazilian” were lumped together with occurrences of “Brazil” since, even if the mention was referring to the Brazilian pavilion, or the Brazilian coffee, or the Brazilian committee, for this project considers that those mentions were ultimately referring to Brazil as a place in the globe, and therefore contributed to shaping the imagined geography of modernity.↩︎

  40. For example, the emergence of dubious terminology like “Indian”, which could either refer to the nationality of India or to Native groups represented at the fair, led me to investigate each occurrence on a case-by-case basis before assigning each mention geographical coordinates of a particular place in the world. Other cases where terms like “America” could refer to Latin America rather than the United States were also closely examined before the geocoding process. Further, close reading of a good chunk of the articles sample was important to understand particularities of the historical context of colonization in some cases, like a few occurrences of “German” referring to “German East Africa.” Similarly, in the wake of the Russo-Japanese war that happened simultaneously to the fair, mentions to the region of “Manchuria” were often associated to the Japanese exhibit. Where it seemed fit, I have decided to assign general latitude and longitude coordinates of present-day Inner Mongolia – the true geographical target of imperialistic and expansionist policies of the Russian Empire and the Empire of Japan. For more on the methodological issues and decisions in the process of data exploration and curatorship, see the data biography made available in the project’s repository in GitHub.↩︎

  41. Similarly, the methodological choices that led me to manually intervene in the automated process of named entity extraction are one fundamental aspect of what distinguishes this project as a work of digital history rather than a work of computer sciences or information technology. Sharon Leon, “The Peril and Promise of Historians as Data Creators: Perspective, Structure, and the Problem of Representation,” [Bracket] (blog), November 24, 2019, https://www.6floors.org/bracket/2019/11/24/the-peril-and-promise-of-historians-as-data-creators-perspective-structure-and-the-problem-of-representation/, 10-11.↩︎

  42. Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, “Text Analysis and Visualization: Making Meaning Count,” in A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman and et. al. (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2016), 345.↩︎

  43. Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Problem of the West” in The Frontier in American History, Introduction by Andrew s. Trees, 143.↩︎

  44. Thomas Bender, A Nation Among Nations, 206.↩︎

  45. World’s Fair Publishing Co., “The Philippine Display to be one of the greatest features of the St. Louis World’s Fair”, World’s Fair Bulletin”, volume 3, number 07 (1902), 20.↩︎

  46. Ibid, 20.↩︎

  47. Ibid, 21.↩︎

  48. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government, 246-247.↩︎

  49. Ben Schmidt, “Vector Space Models for the Digital Humanities”, October 25, 2015. https://bookworm.benschmidt.org/posts/2015-10-25-Word-Embeddings.html.↩︎

  50. Ibid.↩︎